For seven years, our Silicon Designer product has expanded in use, across many countries, languages, and use cases. From B2B applications where franchises easily manage brand collateral, to some of the largest consumer-facing document personalization sites on the planet, our product has proven itself to be solid and reliable, yet also very extensible. It is integrated with numerous forms of shopping cart, DAM system, workflow system, and database, and it has diverse forms of User Interface:

no two Silicon Designers look the same!

Making it easy for our clients to customize their unique implementations has been our top priority. We have found that web standards, implemented correctly, make all the difference.

As more and more organizations implement web-to-print workflows that meet their ever-changing business demands, they often find that customization of their chosen solution is a must. Yet with HTML5 based solutions, this customization layer can be a significant challenge. This is due to the vastly different ways in which software vendors decide to combine the overlapping technologies.

I was writing a press release recently, and I was just about to write a heading that has been something of a mantra the past 20 years: "Standards are the Future". But I paused, realizing the product I was describing is completely standards-based, thanks to recent technology advances. I corrected the title, and I think now is the right time to declare victory for web standards over proprietary technologies and walled gardens.

As of 2015, web standards-based approaches at last make complete sense for the majority of software use cases, at least those that our company works with on a daily basis. Sure, there are places where walled gardens and native software have a valid reason to exist, but those have become the exception rather than the rule.